New Seeds Of Wisdom On The Fruit Firm Survey

Harry and David is a fruit company with headquarters in Medford, Ore. Last week I had a column about a woman--a customer of Harry and David--who had received a survey from the company in the mail.

The survey contained a lot of questions about whether the woman was satisfied with the Harry and David fruit, the Harry and David service, etc. But then the questions started to get bizarre. One question asked the woman her religion. And then others asked her to say whether she agreed or disagreed with certain statements: ``Communists should be prohibited from running for mayor of this city.`` ``I like to think I`m a bit of a swinger.`` ``The purchase and use of marijuana should be legalized.`` ``Federal funding of abortions should be limited.`` ``My world seems to be coming apart at the seams.`` ``Members of the American Nazi Party should be prohibited from running for mayor of this city.`` ``I feel I get a raw deal out of life.`` ``I like to be outrageous.`` ``Pornographic movie theaters and bookstores should be closed down.``

Questions like those. The woman was startled by the questions--why would a fruit company want to know such things? And she also noticed something that disturbed her. There was a code number on the back of her survey--a code number that matched up to a code number on the mailing label on the envelope she had received. Apparently her answers could be matched to her name.

She refused to fill out the survey--she said the whole thing scared her. A person in the Harry and David research department told me that ``the questionnaire is merely a way to get an idea of what the attitudes of our customers are.``

I wrote the column about the questionnaire. Almost immediately, I began to get responses.

The first set of responses was from the general public. People called to say that they, too, had received those wacky questions in the mail--but not from the Harry and David fruit company. People who had recently purchased a variety of products--ranging from automobiles to glassware--said that they had received questionnaires posing those precise questions.

The second set of responses I got was from members of the advertising community. They said that the questions I had reported on were well-known in the advertising and marketing world. They said that the questions had been devised by a research firm called SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif. The questions, the advertising people said, were designed to divide the American people up into subgroups, so that products could be effectively targeted to them.

I did some reading up on the SRI questions. They are part of a service known as VALS--which stands for Values and Lifestyles. Apparently, SRI believes that when people answer those weird questions, they categorize themselves into a number of groups. The groups have names such as

``I-Am-Me,`` ``Experientials,`` and ``Societally Conscious.`` SRI feels that the VALS program is a valuable tool for manufacturers and advertisers to reach potential customers.

It still sounded goofy to me. I can understand why companies and advertising agencies might want to know who their customers are--but why ask them how they would feel about a Nazi running for mayor of their town, or whether they consider themselves swingers?

I got in touch with SRI International in California. Gloria McConnell, the director of the VALS program, confirmed that the questions did, indeed, come from her company.

``What companies do is purchase the right to use our questions,`` she said. ``These are attitudinal questions. The questions allow us to segment the public into different attitudinal groups.`` Apparently, although the majority of the general public has probably never heard of SRI or VALS, the eccentric market study has made large inroads into American life; McConnell said that more than 200 companies use the program--and a 1984 Atlantic Monthly story said that SRI, at that time, had annual revenues of some $175 million.

I asked McConnell why the questions were so peculiar. She said that it had been determined that those questions were the ones that were best able to divide the American population into attitudinal segments.

I also asked her about the code number that the Harry and David customer had noticed on her questionnaire and on her mailing label. Why would such a code number be necessary?

``You would have to be paranoid`` to think that anyone would take the time to match a specific person up with a specific set of answers, McConnell said.

Nevertheless, she said, whenever a survey goes out, there are ``a few people`` who receive it and are bothered by it.

``Once you explain it to them, there is no problem,`` she said.

Maybe not. But I`m of the quaint opinion that if a company wants to know how I feel about fruit or cars, they ought to ask me about fruit and cars. When they start throwing in questions about Nazis and swingers and abortions and marijuana, my impulse is to do exactly what the woman who received the Harry and David survey did: Toss it.